If you walk into any squash club in the world and watch two players warm up, sooner or later you will see it: one player boasts the ball off the side wall to the front, the other sprints in and drives it back to a length, and around it goes. The Boast–Drive is the most famous pairs routine in the sport — around half a century old and still the first thing every coach teaches — because it trains the two skills a match is built on at the same time: retrieving the ball out of the front, and pinning it deep from the back.
Before you take this routine onto a real court, play the drills online first to learn the rhythm. Boast–Drive is all about the flow between the two roles — when to explode forward, when to turn and open the side wall — and running it on screen a few times makes that pattern click before you are doing it at full sprint on court.
What's in the routine
The six drills teach both halves of the pattern — the driver and the boaster — on both sides:
- Boast Return (R) and (L) — the coach boasts from the back; you sprint to the front corner and drive it straight to a deep length. The retrieval-and-length half, one corner at a time.
- Boast–Drive: Driver (R) — boasts come from alternating back corners; dash forward, drive each ball deep, then recover. The classic conditioning loop that leaves you breathing hard.
- Boast–Drive: Driver (Rail) — the same pattern on one side only, so you can groove identical footwork and the same contact point on every rep.
- Boast–Drive: Boaster (R) and (L) — now you play the other role: take the coach's deep drive off the back wall and angle a two-wall boast to the front. Boast quality decides how alive the rally stays.
Both roles, both sides
What makes Boast–Drive such a complete routine is that it never lets you specialise. Play the driver and you are training the explosive lunge into the front and the discipline to send the ball all the way back to the corner. Switch to the boaster and you are learning to read a deep ball, turn to face the side wall, and punch a controlled angle to the front instead of just digging it out. Over a full session you rehearse both ends of almost every rally you will ever play — which is exactly why it has outlived every training fad for fifty years.
A few things to feel while you train it
- Racket up on the way in. As the driver, prepare early during the sprint so you can lunge and strike in one motion — not reach, then wind up.
- Drive it all the way back. A short, loose length hands the initiative straight back. Aim to make the ball die in the back corner every time.
- Turn to face the side wall for the boast. Don't scoop it across your body — open your stance to the side wall and punch the ball forward into it. That is what gives the boast its width and control.
- Recover to the T between every shot. The pattern only works if you reset; the whole drill is as much about the movement back as the shot itself.
Open the routine, watch each drill in 3D Court View or from above on the Tactics Board, then hit Train all drills to run the whole session in order. For more, browse the community's shared work on the Routines and Drills pages.